Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

European AI. A playbook to own it

europe.mistral.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 155 posts

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#121

Post by martin-t »

hparadiz wrote: post #69
martin-t wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case, hopefully the copyright mafia will take the money from US and Chinese LLM companies and redistribute it to the people who did the actual work fueling the models, such as myself. I did not spend 10 years writing (A)GPL code for all of it to be stripped of its license, remixed and sold for profit. Of course in a truly just world, the LLM companies who took my code without permission would beg with offers…

Can you prove your work was used in any of these models? And if so what percentage of your work constitutes the model?

> Can you prove your work was used in any of these models?

They admit it themselves. We also know how aggressively they scrape everything they can get their hands on because projects like Anubis[0] exist

> And if so what percentage of your work constitutes the model?

That should absolutely be quantified, yes. My part is tiny but together with other people whose work was taken without consent, we make the vast majority. Last time I napkinned the math, I estimated making the models took 10^12 hours of work (nearly all being scraped public and possibly even private projects), out of which only 10^6 was paid (work by the employees of the LLM companies). So roughly 10^12 remains unpaid.

[0]: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#122

Post by TonyStr »

latexr wrote: post #57
zmmmmm wrote: post #49

The glaring number to me is only 5% of VC funds vs 52% in the US. That's 10x more opportunity despite roughly comparable economies. As long as that is true, it seems like it will always be impossible to get an organic startup industry working in the EU. Any startup that is any good will almost certainly end up getting a round of investment from the US and most likely move their base of operations there. I wonder if r…

I don’t consider VC investments to be particularly beneficial to the world. This idea of “let’s use capital to make it faster for people to exploit others with the only goal of generating more capital” does more harm than good.

Venture Capital is how entrepreneurs get off the ground and are able to try out new ideas. It is of both the entrepreneur's interest and the investors' interest that the product or service being developed captures value in the market, so they can reimburse their original investments. Without Venture Capital, we are limiting business creation to people who are already wealthy, which severely limits the pool of potential creativity that the society can utilize.

We have regulations in place to make it more difficult and more risky for businesses to engage in immoral behavior, but these regulations usually appear after observing bad behavior.

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#123

Post by blitzar »

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #55
zmmmmm wrote: post #49

The glaring number to me is only 5% of VC funds vs 52% in the US. That's 10x more opportunity despite roughly comparable economies. As long as that is true, it seems like it will always be impossible to get an organic startup industry working in the EU. Any startup that is any good will almost certainly end up getting a round of investment from the US and most likely move their base of operations there. I wonder if r…

Not just startups or funding. Google alone has more AI compute than China and the EU combined. There's no shortage of capital in Europe. But nobody wants to take the risk. Meanwhile in the US, people are putting 10-100x the capital at risk. So you can say what you want about it looking scary to you to invest in the US, but the people with capital to invest clearly don't see it that way. More often when you hear VCs g…

> never-ending EU regulations

Does anyone ever say what these regulations are? Or are they like "red tape" / "regulations on bendy bananas" / "WMDs" / "the war on christmas"?

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#124

Post by ForHackernews »

Barrin92 wrote: post #64
ForHackernews wrote: post #26

I don't understand why European providers can't just host open-weight models developed by the Chinese, or distill Google/OpenAI/Anthropic models to produce their own models on the the cheap. Nobody acts like you need to invent steel to have a steel mill.

what's the point? The Chinese, Google and OpenAI are burning money and we get to use the service. Having AI providers locally barely creates any jobs, it's an easily substitutable service and it has (contrary to the claims by the AI crazies) very few national security implications. Steel is a great example because we don't pollute our rivers with steel mills any more either. As Milton Friedman said, if someone wants…

> The Chinese, Google and OpenAI are burning money and we get to use the service.

Exactly. Take what they spent a lot of R&D bucks developing and host it ourselves at the fraction of the cost.

The point is digital sovereignty. The same reason you keep data on your own hard drive instead of Google's cloud.

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#125

Post by [deleted] »

TonyStr wrote: post #122
latexr wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t consider VC investments to be particularly beneficial to the world. This idea of “let’s use capital to make it faster for people to exploit others with the only goal of generating more capital” does more harm than good.

Venture Capital is how entrepreneurs get off the ground and are able to try out new ideas. It is of both the entrepreneur's interest and the investors' interest that the product or service being developed captures value in the market, so they can reimburse their original investments. Without Venture Capital, we are limiting business creation to people who are already wealthy, which severely limits the pool of potenti…

[deleted]

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#127

Post by loky4i4 »

WarmWash wrote: post #91
shimman wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the US culture, it's not hard to see entrepreneurship as a societal disease. Let's not act like "entrepreneurship" is necessary at all to develop technology. Western governments simply have no ability to find their own destination as any attempt to get off the US big tech ramp comes with threats to destroy defense treaties, weapons contracts, and tariffs with their major ally. Hardly anything to do with "e…

>Good on Europeans for rejecting this American blight. Reject it? They pay hundreds of billions for it. Every year. For decades now. Europe runs on American tech, using American and Chinese hardware, powered by American energy, and protected by American defense. Surely you're confused here, because Europe didn't reject these things, they offshored them and then teased Americans about working so hard. Europe's economi…

and european investors invest more money in usa than eu

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#128

Post by hparadiz »

martin-t wrote: post #121
hparadiz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you prove your work was used in any of these models? And if so what percentage of your work constitutes the model?

> Can you prove your work was used in any of these models? They admit it themselves. We also know how aggressively they scrape everything they can get their hands on because projects like Anubis[0] exist > And if so what percentage of your work constitutes the model? That should absolutely be quantified, yes. My part is tiny but together with other people whose work was taken without consent, we make the vast majorit…

Sounds like a no.

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#129

Post by solarkraft »

blitzar wrote: post #123
tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just startups or funding. Google alone has more AI compute than China and the EU combined. There's no shortage of capital in Europe. But nobody wants to take the risk. Meanwhile in the US, people are putting 10-100x the capital at risk. So you can say what you want about it looking scary to you to invest in the US, but the people with capital to invest clearly don't see it that way. More often when you hear VCs g…

> never-ending EU regulations Does anyone ever say what these regulations are? Or are they like "red tape" / "regulations on bendy bananas" / "WMDs" / "the war on christmas"?

There needs to be a signal for bureaucracy critics to use if they’re not bullshitting.

Because without it, they will quickly be grouped into the “I want to do things which SHOULD be forbidden” crowd, which is a pretty vocal one.

Re: European AI. A playbook to own it

#130

Post by nl »

martin-t wrote: post #119
nl wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have written a bunch of (A)GPL code too and I'm 100% supportive of AI learning from it.

Great, you have that right. But it begs the question why you chose (A)GPL instead of a permissive license in the first place. If you are OK with people training and using LLMs on top of your work not giving users the right to inspect and modify, you must have logically been OK with it before. The existence of LLMs or even AI is irrelevant to your position.

Yes, and I generally prefer permissive licenses precisely because of this. Nevertheless, I've also done GPL and AGPL code.
Post reply on HN